Oh, you beautiful souls in Battle Creek, Michigan: the teacher, the pipelayer, the barista, the big-hearted tech at the vet’s office checking in a scared family’s pug. How I wish you would stop being an infrequent participant in our democracy and take the time to vote in the upcoming election.

Scratch that. I’m off script.

I became a one-way pen pal for democracy in 2018, writing letters and postcards to strangers in the lead-up to that year’s midterm elections. 

I had spent the months before marching for women, science, immigrants, and Muslims. Then I decided marching wasn’t enough. I needed to engage individual Americans about electing politicians who shared my values. 

So that September, I attended a grassroots event to learn about volunteer voter outreach hosted by a Los Angeles group called Civic Sundays. We could choose to learn how to knock on doors, call and text prospective voters, or write postcards to engage people.

I’d never heard of writing postcards to strangers as a way to encourage them to vote. But I was charmed by the thought of an analog means of saving democracy. Civic Sundays and other organizations, many of which sprang to life following the 2016 presidential election, supply volunteers with lists of names and addresses of registered voters. The writers supply penmanship, stamps, and sometimes the postcards themselves.

I joined a large table of people with seemingly professional-level glitter and Magic Marker skills. While their postcards looked like illuminated manuscripts, I painstakingly struggled to make mine legible. A fourth-grade teacher once told me my writing resembled a hostage taker’s ransom note, but fortunately, I didn’t have to take a handwriting test to get a seat at the postcard table (some organizations do actually require one).

I found the work rather wholesome, but I wasn’t sold on the idea of trying to engage a population that couldn’t be bothered to vote.

The more postcards I wrote, the more I started to wonder: Who were these infrequent voters? Why weren’t they doing their civic duty? If I looked their address up on Google Maps, what would I see? Unmown lawns? Gated mansions?

I became racked by a desire to know who exactly were these shirkers of civic responsibility. But we’d been given clear instructions: Do not personally engage the recipients of your missives. Instead, we followed a clear and concise script of just a few sentences.

I participated in another postcard-writing campaign for the 2020 presidential election. This time, I specifically requested names from a swing state, Michigan. As I wrote to these strangers, I became increasingly frustrated, imagining them enjoying their weekends without a scintilla of voting guilt while I agonized over whether they might be offended by a postage stamp with a cat on it.

When I mentioned these frustrations to a cynical friend, he told me to read the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s famous 1966 “Letter to a Young Activist.” I should have been suspicious, seeing as my friend would be the last person to write a postcard to a stranger. Sure enough, Merton’s words did not reassure me about the fate of my postcards. “[D]o not depend on the hope of results,” he wrote. “When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.”

After reading Merton’s letter, I spent some months not writing the scofflaw voters of Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, or anywhere else.

But when the 2024 election campaign started up, with the future of the country once again on the ballot, I asked for another postcard list.

This time one of the choices was to write to people in my own state, California. This felt more like writing a neighbor than someone far away and utterly unknown. Once I had my list and started reading the names and addresses, I realized some of my postcards would be going to people who lived near the town where I work.

And then it happened. I recognized a name. The Gen Zer who needed a nudge to vote was one of my thoughtful, capable students.

I finally had an answer about the people I was writing to. They were just like the rest of us: unmarried singles and matriarchs of big families, people who drive electric cars and people who drive big trucks, charming people and irritating people and neighbors who played their music too loud but were sweet with their kids. People so busy leading their lives that they sometimes forgot or opted not to vote.

Recognizing just one name made me certain I had to keep penning these epistles of democracy, to keep reminding others, even if they didn’t listen or want to hear it, that their vote mattered. With new insight into Merton’s famous missive, I had to put my trust in, as he put it, “the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

The post How I Became a One-Way Pen Pal for Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post Constitutional Lawyer Maxwell L. Stearns appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Convince me,” Los Angeles Times columnist Erika D. Smith told Maxwell L. Stearns, the author of the forthcoming book Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, at last week’s public program “Would Parliamentary America Have More Fun?” at the ASU California Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Calling herself the “resident cynic” about the future of America’s democracy, Smith asked Stearns to make the case for why a multi-party parliamentary system would make America’s government more functional and civic-minded. By the time the conversation had wrapped, Smith seemed to have come around to Stearns’ proposal.

Stearns said he decided to write Parliamentary America because he saw that the country’s democracy was in danger, and was convinced that current proposals—such as ranked choice voting and eliminating the Electoral College—wouldn’t solve the fundamental democratic crisis facing the nation. “I never envisioned myself writing a book on how to fix American democracy, but I had to write the book on how to fix American democracy,” he said.

He modeled his proposal laid out in the book on the successes and failures of political systems around the world in places like England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela. In England, he found that there weren’t enough parties; in Brazil, however, there were too many. Stearns’ big takeaway: America needs to seek out the “Goldilocks principle,” which he cites as somewhere between four to eight political parties, all of which have vital roles in governance.

It’s possible, he said. All it would take are three amendments to the current Constitution: doubling the size of the House of Representatives by having citizens vote by district and by party, having a House majority coalition to elect the president, and allowing a super-majority of the House to remove a president from office with a no-confidence vote.

“What I propose is radical,” he said. But nodding to the subtitle of his book, he argued that it was the “least radical” way forward. This creates a path that leaves “many foundational American institutions intact—even things that a lot of people aren’t going to like.”

My goal here isn’t to make people happy, Stearns continued. It’s to make democracy functional.

Stearns posits that America is currently facing its third constitutional crisis. (He dates the previous two to the period under the Articles of Confederation and the lead-up to the Civil War to the period of Reconstruction.) America’s two-party system, “which we endured for a couple of hundred years,” is the culprit this time around. The system has made politics so divisive that people believe that people who disagree with them “lack basic intelligence or are evil,” which has rendered government and society dysfunctional, he said. “We need to recognize we’re in crisis, and have to come together to find a solution.”

“A lot of what you’re talking about depends on Americans actually wanting functioning government,” Smith pointed out.

“I don’t believe that the vast majority of Americans believe we thrive in a dysfunctional system,” Stearns said. During multiple times in the night, he called on the audience to be optimistic. It’s too important to give up, he said. By passing these three amendments, it would make it possible for people to vote for someone they’re really happy to vote for and not be punished for that vote.

That would end the “third-party dilemma” Americans currently face, he said. Right now, if you vote outside of the two major candidates, you’re either benefiting the major party candidate you favor the least or pulling votes from both sides, making whoever wins into a “roll of the dice.”

During the Q&A, in-person and online chatroom audience members asked Stearns to speak about various aspects of his proposed system. One in-person member from Berlin asked Stearns if he could speak about the downside of Germany’s mixed‐member electoral system, which combines majority voting with proportional representation. “We’re completely stuck because of the number of parties we have in our coalition at this point,” she said referring to the current Bundestag, the German federal parliament, which some say is “bursting at the seams.”

“I’m proposing a very American adaptation of the German system,” Stearns answered. “We don’t need pure party proportionality. We need ‘good enough’ proportionality, so no party can win on its own.”

Before the conversation wrapped, Smith asked Stearns what American democracy could look like in his wildest dreams, if these three amendments were passed.

“I’m not suggesting we sing ‘Kumbaya,’” said Stearns, “but we can have functional politics.”

The alternative, he said, is the danger of collapse or autocracy. “We want to make sure we’re not in one of those democracies that die. That’s why I wrote this book, which is dedicated to my children and yours.”

“We can leave future generations a better democracy,” he said.

The post One Nation … Under Parliament? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’re a prisoner, held in a dark cave. Your hands are tied behind you and you can only look straight ahead at the cave wall. Your captors keep you occupied by putting objects on it. To pass the time you and your fellow prisoners play games. Who can be the first to shout out the name of the object? Who can correctly guess which object will appear next?

You feel pride when you’re right—because being right about the objects is the only thing of value you have.

One day a fellow prisoner escapes their chains, and looking around the cave, realizes that what you’ve all thought were real objects on the wall were only shadows cast by a fire that’s burning behind you. The escaped prisoner manages to find a ladder, climbs out of the cave, and rushes into the blinding sunlight. As their eyes adjust to the brightness, they realize that the cave isn’t reality at all; it is only a dungeon for the mind.

They decide to go back into the cave to rescue you and your fellow prisoners by telling you the truth about the world as it actually is. But when they try to explain about the shadows and the sunlight and the colorful world outside, you and your fellow prisoners refuse to believe them. When the former prisoner urges you all to come to terms with your delusions and free yourself, you band together and kill them. Rather than follow your liberator out of the cave, you collectively turn your attention back to the shadows.

This story is, of course, Plato’s “allegory of the cave” from his book The Republic, written in the second half of the 4th century B.C.E. But it’s also us, today. Our 21st-century cave is our modern media system, where truth is a spectacle controlled by propaganda. Some of us are prisoners, some of us are creating shadows, and some of us are escapees. All of us are vulnerable to manipulation.

In Plato’s allegory we’re supposed to conclude that the deluded prisoners are both victims and villains and that the escaped prisoner is a tragic hero, motivated only by pure knowledge of the truth. But it’s equally plausible to draw different conclusions about the cave and its prisoners.

What if the escaped prisoner didn’t have noble goals? What if they only claimed they’d escaped the cave and can now reveal the “real” truth—but are instead just selling a dangerous, fraudulent fiction? What if, for example, conspiracy clowns, manipulators, or demagogues (or conspiracy clown manipulator demagogues) tell us they’re the hero freed from the cave’s shadows? If you’re imprisoned in the cave, is it better to believe the “truth” of the shadows or the “truth” of the escapee?

How could you tell the difference? The uncomfortable truth is that you can’t. That’s why we’re all equally vulnerable. We ought to beware of the shadows on the wall, but also, we ought to beware of anyone who claims that the shadows are shadows.

Most Americans cannot have direct, first-hand experience with political events, either in our state capitals or in our nation’s capital. If we want to know anything at all about the decisions that affect us, we have to trust some source of news or another. Those sources “cultivate” political reality for us. None of us really know if we’re looking at shadows or if we’re blinded by the sun. We only know what we think we know through the media we consume.

There used to be a consensus around this political reality because there was a common news agenda set via mainstream media organizations. Like the prisoners looking at the cave wall, most of us agreed on a basic set of facts, and we mostly trusted the government and accepted its policies. That consensus was achieved via the “manufacture of consent” model of propaganda, where political and business elites used media to shape our opinions so that we’d passively accept elite decisions.

When we think of propaganda, it’s usually that top-down “manufacture of consent” model. Examples of this model could be 20th-century war films, posters, and leaflets created by the government and disseminated to the masses; patriotic symbols and slogans, and monuments to political leaders; or messaging foreign governments use against their citizens (in schools, in the news), and more recently, against the U.S. and its elections.

But over the last two decades, the rise of the right-wing media ecosystem and participatory media has enabled a new form of propaganda in our public sphere. Called the “manufacture of dissent” model of propaganda, it uses communication as a weapon to attack established institutions, norms, and the government itself. Its major premise is that politics is war and the enemy cheats. Those who produce dissent propaganda circulate endless conspiracy theories, accusations of hypocrisy, ad hominem attacks, and ad baculum threats. It’s the politics of creating fear and turning people into hate-objects.

This “manufacture of dissent” model of propaganda has challenged consensus media’s ability to control our political reality. It screams that the old propaganda is “propaganda,” while claiming that its own twisted messaging is the truth. All of this has led to a historic crisis of distrust in our government institutions, with an entire political agenda built around dismantling government power.

But whether propaganda is manufacturing our consent or our dissent, both are a kind of force imprisoning our minds—and both are fundamentally anti-democratic.

Propaganda, after all, is communication as force; it’s designed for warfare. It uses strategies like fear appeals, disinformation, and conspiracy theories to deny our ability to consent. It erases complexity and nuance, and it encourages groupthink and partisan discord. It asks us to think too much like others on our side while preventing us from thinking with others on their side.

The powerful point to the things that divide us rather than the things we agree on and use those differences as a wedge. Or, even when we can agree on the problems, the way that the powerful frame them prevents us from agreeing on the solutions. We don’t have a common reality that can help us mediate those differences.

In The Republic, Socrates, the narrator, solves this problem by advising the escaped prisoner not to return to the cave at all. The cave-dwellers, who only perceive the world through their senses, would not be able to absorb the bright light of truth, and the newly enlightened former prisoner would look foolish, Socrates thought. Worse, the escaped prisoner would harm themselves by trying to commune with the deluded—after all, they no longer agreed about reality, how could they find common ground?

Plato thought that the enlightened ought to rule over the cave dwellers as philosopher kings, but Plato’s solution won’t work for us in the 21st-century (and it didn’t work for Plato back then either).

There isn’t an obvious solution, except for people to agree to communicate for the democratic way of life. That means using persuasion instead of propaganda.

Persuasion is a dialogic meeting of minds in which one person asks another person to think like they do, to value the same values, to remember or forget history in the same way. It doesn’t force. It affirms human dignity by inviting. A person who seeks to persuade gives good reasons and formulates arguments in the best way they know how, always affirming that the recipient of the persuasive message has a mind, values, and experiences of their own and may not change their mind.

Unlike the fast, exciting, and entertaining work of propaganda, persuasion is slow, difficult, and unsexy. It doesn’t make good TV or internet content. But until we’re willing to persuade, and are open to being persuaded, we’ll stay in our 21st-century cave, which provides us with a never-ending propaganda spectacle to imprison our minds.

In today’s era of ubiquitous propaganda, the shadows aren’t real, but the sun blinds. We want to know the truth, but it’s hard to know who to trust to tell us the truth. Most of us throw up our hands and give up—avoiding political news altogether—but some of us dig into one version of the truth or the other, motivated by the status and prestige we get as rewards for being right.

There are those of us in the cave smug in the fact that what we believe—what we’re motivated to believe—is actually true. Simultaneously there are those of us standing outside of the cave looking down at the cave dwellers smug in the fact that what we believe—what we’re motivated to believe—is actually true.

One or both of us are wrong, and it’s tearing our nation apart.

The post What Is 21st-Century Truth? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The one thing that Americans do agree on is that it’s getting worse: nearly 8 in 10 Americans polled in a 2018 election day survey said that, “Americans are becoming more politically divided.”

We’ve heard a lot lately about issues of civility and free speech. These issues are headline grabbing, but they aren’t central to what is broken in our public sphere. Rather, issues of civility and free speech are symptoms of larger, systemic problems.

America’s public sphere is broken because we communicate as propagandists and we don’t know the rules of productive discussion and debate. Focusing on free speech or civility to solve these problems is, in fact, a red herring, a distraction from the real issues that need to be addressed.

It’s plain that our current way of speaking to each other doesn’t work. A recent Pew survey found that 53 percent of Americans thought that talking about politics with people on the other side of the political divide is “stressful and frustrating.” And, it seems, having those stressful and frustrating conversations makes things worse, not better. Sixty-three percent in the Pew poll said that talking to those across the political divide left them feeling like they have even less in common than they had previously believed. That could be because only 4 percent of Americans describe their political opposition as “fair.”

Partisanship and distrust have infected all aspects of our civic life. We only have confidence and trust in the government when our side controls it and we fear the worst when our side does not. There is currently no credible, neutral “umpire” of American politics—there is no media organization that we all trust to tell us what we need to know to make good decisions, and there is no government institution that we all trust to uphold the rule of law.

We treat one another as partisans first and as citizens second. And, what’s worse, our media, government institutions, and elected officials seem to prefer us to be partisans.

Without hyperbole, we might describe our moment as another “age of catastrophe,” similar to the one that saw the collapse of many economies and democracies between the two world wars.

Our current age of catastrophe is characterized by a fundamental breakdown of the nation’s public sphere—as evidenced by widespread distrust, political polarization, and frustration.

On October 25, 1931—during the previous age of catastrophe—philosopher John Dewey gave a radio lecture on the relationship between education and democracy. “Democracy will be a farce,” explained Dewey, “unless individuals are trained to think for themselves, to judge independently, to be critical, to be able to detect subtle propaganda and the motives which inspire it.”

Does Dewey’s edict still apply? Can we educate ourselves out of this disaster? Maybe. There are two important differences between then and now. First, in the 1930s, government propaganda contributed to the age of catastrophe. Today, we citizens are the propagandists behind the catastrophe.

Everything about our current media ecosystem is designed for us to communicate as propagandists. Ubiquitous notifications are designed to addict us so we continually engage with messages. Likes, favorites, and retweets reward us by pinging the dopamine receptors in our brains. Apps withhold notifications to keep us cycling back for positive feedback, and algorithms reward and amplify only the most polarizing messages—so that we are constantly urged to voice our most outrageous takes on political events.

Every single one of us has more propaganda power in our pockets than any government had at its disposal between the world wars. Instead of being independent thinkers who are overwhelmed by and succumb to government “newspeak,” we willingly create, consume, and spread propaganda ourselves. We create memes to attack our political opponents. We watch and share conspiracy theories and other “news” riddled with half-truths. We communicate cynically and gullibly—we believe nothing the other side says and everything our side says.

Communicating cynically and gullibly has broken our public sphere. Our addiction to propaganda has left us vulnerable. Look again at the 2016 Russian propaganda efforts and you’ll see that their strategy was to take advantage of our already hyper-polarized public sphere to get us all to spread their messages of distrust and resentment. And we did.

Like Dewey said in 1931, we need to be educated to think, judge, and be critical about the news that we post and consume. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know how to do this. We might consider encouraging social media users to take a training course in journalism skills so that when they produce media content they know how to do so responsibly.

Another difference between Dewey’s era and our own is that in 1931 we had more trust in government, media, and institutions than we do now, in large part because we participated in collective decision-making more back then than we do now. Robert Putnam explained in Bowling Alone that generations of Americans have stopped joining clubs, PTAs, and other civic organizations that once served as laboratories for democracy. Our failure to participate in these organizations meant that we failed to learn democratic practices. Our failure to participate also made us less trusting of the decisions that are being made on our behalf. Eventually, we began to distrust the democratic process itself.

Researchers know that there’s a reciprocal relationship between participating in public deliberation and trusting the outcomes of the decisions made. This means that we need to learn skills in public deliberation. But public deliberation requires neutral arbiters—referees—to regulate our public discourse. We could be our own umpires, but we don’t know the rules. Without rules, our conversations are unproductive, and those who speak the loudest, with the most anger, control our public discourse.

We can still join civic organizations and learn the rules of productive conversations. We can also participate in structured conversations in our local communities. We have institutions that know how to teach such skills. Organizations like the Kettering Foundation conduct training in how to facilitate difficult conversations and create issue guides for communities to use for problem solving. Communication centers like the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University are labs for teaching these democratic skills. Students there learn how to design fair deliberative processes, facilitate conversations with Colorado communities, and act as neutral guides for real-world community problem solving.

And it works. According to Martín Carcasson, director of the Colorado State center, “with a good process, we can significantly lower the bar on the difficulty of the conversation, and often get much better results.” He said that, in his 12 years of facilitating those conversations he has found that the situation ended up worse than it started in only a handful of cases. “I truly believe,” said Carcasson, that “we aren’t nearly as divided as we think we are, and a quality conversation can reveal that.”

A recent report from More in Common backs up such optimism: “77% of Americans believe our differences are not so great that we cannot come together.” In other words, those 63 percent of Americans who reported having even less in common after talking about politics with someone from the other side of the political divide probably weren’t doing it right.

Perhaps Dewey was overly optimistic, and democracy has always been something of a farce. Even so, learning to communicate as citizens rather than as propagandists and learning how to have productive conversations about difficult topics could prevent our democratic farce from turning into tragedy. We must avert the catastrophe of our broken public sphere.

The post Preaching Civility Won’t Save American Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.